Previews

Fallout 3

We finally crack open the Vault to get our first peek at the next Fallout.

Spiffy:

Great-looking graphics and atmosphere; promising gameplay; looks like a good compromise between Fallout and Oblivion.

Iffy:

It's more than a year away; we haven't had hands-on; we've only seen the beginning.

When Bethesda announced that it was developing the next Fallout title, you could feel both the excitation and the trepidation pass through the Internet's series of tubes and wires. Would it still be turn-based? Would it just be Oblivion with guns? Or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. but with Pip-Boy art? Finally, Bethesda has not only premiered a teaser trailer that demonstrates that Fallout 3 still maintains the spirit and atmosphere of the Fallout franchise, but also showed the game to the press for the first time, and of course we were on hand to see it.

Live in the Vault, Die in the Vault

For the demo being given to the press, Executive Producer Todd Howard provided a lot of narration and commentary, while Lead Designer Emil Pagliarulo was the one actually playing the game (they demoed on the Xbox 360, though the game is slated for simultaneous release on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC). Howard commented, "We recognized that the Dark Brotherhood quest line is the best one in Oblivion, and we decided that since Emil did such a great job with the Dark Brotherhood, we're giving him all of Fallout 3 to play with."

Howard prefaced the demonstration by showing the amount of research and preproduction that went into Fallout 3, noting that Fallout was their target for tone and feel. He went on to comment, "Fallout 2 is also great, but it was a little too nod-nod-wink-wink in its jokes. Too many pop culture references, too much breaking of the fourth wall. The 'go ahead and kill me, I'll just reload and kill you' type of thing was a bit too far, and we prefer Fallout's still-funny, but toned-down humor in comparison." He also elaborated that Fallout 3 takes place thirty years after Fallout 2, but features a new protagonist in a new setting (Vault 101, a Vault underneath the ruins of Washington D.C.). He quickly added, "For our purposes, neither Fallout Tactics nor Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel happened."

The first thing we noticed after the footage of the trailer (which is part of Fallout 3's overall intro) is that Fallout 3 is indeed in first-person. Howard explains, "If you're going to play this character and feel like you're in the world, nothing beats first-person." He points out that it's easier to appreciate the retro-future look of the Vault in first-person, as you can walk right up to the goofy chairs and computers. Howard does recognize that players played Oblivion in third-person view, and Fallout 3 has an improved third-person camera. In fact, not only is it perfectly playable from third-person, but you can zoom out the camera to make it almost isometric, in a nod to the previous two games.

While Pagliarulo looks around the Vault, Howard notes, "The first game said 'you lived your whole life in the Vault' and then promptly kicked you out. For this time, we want to make the player feel like he's lived his whole life in the Vault." He estimates that players will spend about an hour inside of Vault 101, starting with birth and going all the way until the player turns 19 (Howard says that the only hardcoded characteristic of the player is that s/he is a 19-year old human, everything else is completely customizable). In discrete segments, players go through birth, your first birthday, your tenth birthday, your sixteenth birthday, and finally the nineteenth. Right at birth, you pick your character's gender and general looks; in fact, after doing so, the game will map your basic look onto your father, who will reveal a "family resemblance" after taking his surgical mask off.